The present study focuses on the relation between a grammatical and a lexical-semantic aspect of verb production. The spontaneous speech of three different populations (normally developing children, agrammatic aphasics, and children with a specific language impairment) has been analyzed with respect to the proportion of finite clauses and the diversity of the produced lexical verbs. The group r...

We report on two individuals with acquired language impairment who made thematic role confusion errors in both comprehension and production. Their confusions were remarkably specific, affecting the roles associated with spatial prepositions ("The box is in the bag" confused with The bag is in the box) and adjectival comparatives ("The glove is darker than the hat" confused with The hat is darke...

German particle verbs, like anblicken (to gaze at) combine a base verb (blicken) with a particle (an) to form a special kind of Multi Word Expression. Particle verbs may share the semantics of the base verb and the particle to a variable degree. However, while syntactic subcategorization frames tend to be good predictor for the semantics of verbs in general (verbs that are similar in meaning al...

In languages like German or Dutch, the distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs is borne out by a number of syntactic tests. Unergative verbs appear in impersonal passives while unaccusative verbs do not (cf. Perlmutter (1978)). Unergative verbs select the perfect auxiliary haben/hebben (to have) while unaccusative verbs select sein/zijn (to be) (cf. Hoekstra (1984)). Unaccusative ...

1.1 General introduction One of the most challenging areas for infants acquiring English as their native language are multi-word verbs: There many different kinds of such verbs – e.g., prepositional verbs, phrasal verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) terminology – and they come with different kinds of semantics and sy...

Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced-choice p...